Cut and Paste Translation/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Cut and Paste Translations in Literature include:

  • The translation of The Bible directed by King James the 1st of England is the Ur Example. Instructions were given to the translators to make sure the translation supported the views of the Church of England.
    • Interestingly enough, many fundamentalist Christians claim that the King James version is the only true translation of The Bible, and all other translations have been Macekred by Satan himself. The movement is named King James Only and some advocates go Up to Eleven saying that the English King James is a new superior revelation that replaces the Bible in all languages, including the originals.
    • The King James Version wasn't Macekred enough, apparently. For instance, the original New Testament denounces malakoi. Malakos is Greek for "soft". Many Greeks saw luxury as "weakening", while spartan conditions made men strong, hence the word "spartan". It's denouncing the rich! The KJV translated it as "effeminate". 20th-century translations, being what they were, further Macekred "effeminate" into "homosexual", keeping with the psychiatric theories of the time. The Old Testament still denounces men who "lie with men as with women"; take what you will from that. Of course, many fundamentalists have no problem citing different Bibles to fit their political views, making for a literal Cut and Paste Translation.
    • There's also teetotaller translations which selectively translate the same word as either "wine" or "unfermented grape juice" depending on whether the context of the rest of the line is speaking of it as pleasurable or warning against the dangers of overindulging (where "overindulging" is, for these congregations, defined as "imbibing at all").
    • There is also research suggesting that translations of the Bible are almost perfect translations of extant copies of the Old Testament and a few New Testament passages such as what are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and these translations are actually within 90% accuracy from the originals.
      • This is odd research, considering there are no "New Testament passages" in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Also, a 90% accuracy rate means one-tenth of the work is inaccurate.
  • Matthew Ward's English translation of The Stranger (currently the most popular one in America) spends some time bashing Stuart Gilbert's (which before his was the only one available in America.) In the original French, and in Ward's version, the narrator begins as a Terse Talker in the vein of an Ernest Hemingway protagonist, then becomes oddly lyrical after going to jail. Gilbert essentially turns him British, and incidentally rewrites some of his odder comments to sound more conventional.
  • Used in-story in Ayn Rand's We The Living, where Kira and Leo go to see a movie called The Golden Octopus, which is a laughably censored American film with obviously different-looking Russian footage added at the beginning.
  • The one extant translation of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris into English was based on a French translation rather than the original Polish novel, and suffered accordingly. Lem, who was fluent in English, vocally disapproved of the double translation, but the rights to the novel belong to his Polish publisher and they have thus far had no interest in commissioning another.
  • This sort of thing happened even before animation itself: In the 19th century, the works of Jules Verne got altered drastically when translated into English, generally by utterly incompetent people who made basic mistakes and replaced all of the greatly-detailed (albeit outdated) science with even worse scientific and mathematical errors, and often cut out entire chapters. The most egregious example is quite possibly an early translation of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which is affectionately known as the "Hardwigg version" among people who care, after the Translation Name Change of The Professor. It changed the writing style of the novel completely.
  • The German translation of Terry Pratchett's Good Omens completely omits the homosexual content about Aziraphale: "gayer than a tree full of monkeys high on nitrous oxide" becomes "whimsical (verschmitzt) as a tree full of monkeys" which doesn't really make sense. Also, Shadwell's "Southern Pansy" becomes something else entirely. It's not really clear why, because neither are those lines likely to be offensive nor is German society extra sensitive about homosexuality.
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